Learning to Learn in an Era of Surprise? Intelligence Production and Use in Foreign Policy-Making in Britain, Germany and the European Union

拟议的项目解决了在三个“战略意外”的背景下，国家和欧洲外交政策中所谓的预期、准备和反应失败的突出问题：阿拉伯之春，俄罗斯吞并克里米亚（Bildt, 2013），以及所谓的伊斯兰国/达伊沙的迅速崛起。战略文件指出了不确定性的上升程度，并宣称“我们生活在一个可预测的不可预测性的世界”。因此，我们将使自己能够更快、更灵活地应对未来的未知情况”（EGS, 2016: 46）。为了应对这些意外和所谓的失败，不同的公共机构对阿拉伯之春（2012年）、欧盟对俄罗斯的态度（上议院2015年）、2003年入侵伊拉克（枢密院参赞委员会，2016年）和不同危机的汇合（德国外交部，2014年）进行了绩效评估。从这些事件中吸取的教训可能会影响未来几年的外交政策，就像20世纪30年代的教训影响了一代美国和欧洲政策制定者的思想一样，无论好坏（Lebow, 1985）。然而，现有的少数公开调查在深度和范围、判断成功和失败的标准以及如何处理后见之明偏见等问题上存在很大差异。此外，不仅从业者对什么是可知的和应该学习的存在分歧，而且公共和中介辩论在构建失败时也遵循自己的逻辑（Oppermann & Spencer, 2016）。国际关系领域现有的学术文献也没有为解决这些问题提供太多帮助：它很少定义它所认为的成功学习，也没有具体说明这种学习在什么条件下发生在外交政策决策中。问题的部分原因在于，在更广泛的国际关系（Levy, 1994）和政治学（Sanderson, 2002）中，缺乏对学习和智力的竞争概念的参与。此外，从美国案例研究中收集到的见解，可能不适用于组织和政治上更为多样化的欧洲环境。与美国相比，欧洲国家可能会以不同的、更直接的方式受到这些新旧威胁的影响，因为欧洲的地缘政治邻近性和独特的社会文化构成。在此背景下，该项目旨在提供更好的规范和证据基础，以学习有关这些不同类型威胁的警告和当前情报的正确教训。第一步，项目团队将与相关文献和主要实践者进行接触，以达到在外交政策方面良好学习的规范基础和现实期望。这将形成基于最有可能的研究设计的实证工作的基础。我们关注的是英国、德国和欧盟这三个在欧洲外交政策中最有能力的角色，它们都有各自独特但又相互关联的情报和外交政策社区。项目团队将通过结合桌面研究和从业者访谈来研究这些参与者如何处理三个重大战略意外案例，以确定威胁出现和升级的实际动态，以及随着时间的推移和给予实质性不确定性的知识要求。第三，项目团队将主要利用访谈数据和演员之间的比较来研究演员的表现以及相对成功和失败的潜在原因。最后一步，我们将与咨询委员会和一系列研讨会的从业人员合作，阐明从每个案例中吸取的主要教训，以及如何提高行为体更好地预测和应对新威胁的能力。

TThe proposed project addresses salient concerns about alleged failures of anticipation, preparedness and response in national and European foreign policy against a backdrop of three 'strategic surprises': the Arab Spring, the Russian annexation of the Crimea (Bildt, 2013), and the rapid rise of the so-called Islamic State/D'aesh. Strategy documents identify rising levels of uncertainty and proclaim '[w]e live in a world of predictable unpredictability. We will therefore equip ourselves to respond more rapidly and flexibly to the unknown lying ahead' (EGS, 2016: 46). In response to these surprises and alleged failures, different public bodies have conducted performance reviews relating to the Arab Spring (2012), the EU's approach to Russia (House of Lords 2015), the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Committee of Privy Counsellors, 2016) and the confluence of different crises (German Foreign Office, 2014). Lessons identified from these episodes are likely to shape future foreign policy for years to come, just as lessons from the 1930s shaped the thinking of a generation of US and European policy-makers, for good or for worse (Lebow, 1985). Yet, the few existing public inquiries differ substantially in their depth and scope, the criteria for judging success and failure, and how they handle problems such as hindsight bias. Moreover, not only do practitioners disagree about what is knowable and should be learnt, but public and mediatised debates follow their own logic in constructing failures (Oppermann & Spencer, 2016). The existing academic literature in the field of International Relations does not offer much help in addressing these questions either: It rarely defines what it considers successful learning, nor does it specify under what conditions such learning takes place in foreign policy decision-making. Part of the problem is the lack of engagement with competing conceptions of learning and intelligence in the broader field of International Relations (Levy, 1994) and evidence-based public policy in political science (Sanderson, 2002). Moreover, insights gleaned from US case studies may not be applicable in an organisationally and politically more diverse European setting. European countries may be affected by these old and new threats in different and more direct ways than the United States given Europe's close geopolitical proximity and distinct socio-cultural make-up.Against this background the project aims to provide a better normative and evidential basis for learning the right lessons about warning and current intelligence in relation to these different kinds of threats. In a first step the project team will engage with the relevant literature as well as leading practitioners to arrive at a normatively grounded yet realistic expectations of good learning in foreign policy looks. This will form the basis for the empirical work which is based on a most likely research design. We focus on three of the most capable actors in European foreign policy with the UK, Germany and the EU, each with their distinct yet interconnected intelligence and foreign policy communities. The project team will look at how these actors have handled three cases of major strategic surprises by combining desk-based research and practitioner interviews to ascertain the actual dynamics of threat emergence and escalation with the knowledge claims over time and given substantial uncertainty. Thirdly, the project team will then draw mainly on interview data and comparisons between the actors to study performance and underlying causes of relative success and failure. In a final step, we will engage with practitioners on the Advisory Board and in a series of workshop to elucidate key lessons to be learnt from each of these cases and how to improve actors' capacities to better anticipate and react to new threats.